No Country for Women - Humanism, Secularism, Feminism

Taslima Nasreen

Taslima Nasreen, an award-winning writer, physician, secular humanist and human rights activist, is known for her powerful writings on women oppression and unflinching criticism of religion, despite forced exile and multiple fatwas calling for her death. In India, Bangladesh and abroad, Nasreen’s fiction, nonfiction, poetry and memoir have topped the best-seller’s list.

Taslima Nasreen was born in Bangladesh. She started writing when she was 13. Her writings won the hearts of people across the border and she landed with the prestigious literary award Ananda from India in 1992. Taslima won The Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought from the European Parliament in 1994. She received the Kurt Tucholsky Award from Swedish PEN, the Simone de Beauvoir Award and Human Rights Award from Government of France, Le Prix de l' Edit de Nantes from the city of Nantes, France, Academy prize from the Royal Academy of arts, science and literature from Belgium. She is a Humanist Laureate in The International Academy for Humanism,USA. She won Distinguished Humanist Award from International Humanist and Ethical Union, Free-thought Heroine award from Freedom From Religion foundation, USA., IBKA award, Germany,and Feminist Press Award, USA . She got the UNESCO Madanjeet Singh prize for Promotion of the Tolerance and Non-violence in 2005. She received the Medal of honor of Lyon. She got honorary citizenship from Paris, Nantes, Lyon, Metz, Thionville, Esch etc. Taslima was awarded the Condorcet-Aron Prize at the “Parliament of the French Community of Belgium” in Brussels and Ananda literary award again in 2000.

Bestowed with honorary doctorates from Gent University and UCL in Belgium, and American University of Paris and Paris Diderot University in France, she has addressed gatherings in major venues of the world like the European Parliament, National Assembly of France, Universities of Sorbonne, Oxford, Harvard, Yale, etc. She got fellowships as a research scholar at Harvard and New York Universities. She was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow in the USA in 2009.

Taslima has written 40 books in Bengali, which includes poetry, essays, novels and autobiography series. Her works have been translated in thirty different languages. Some of her books are banned in Bangladesh. Because of her thoughts and ideas she has been banned, blacklisted and banished from Bengal, both from Bangladesh and West Bengal part of India. She has been prevented by the authorities from returning to her country since 1994, and to West Bengal since 2007.

EVENTS

Not celebrating Christmas the Mass of Christ

Most Christians believe December 25th is the birthday of Jesus, but some historians do not believe December 25th is the birthday of Jesus. Among Ex-Christian atheists most celebrate Christmas, some don’t. I am in favor of not celebrating Christmas. Atheists treat Christmas as winter solstice, the Pagan holiday. I am nor in favor of celebrating Pagan superstitions. Both Christians and atheists love Christmas trees, Christmas gifts, Christmas lights, Christmas songs and snow-man, Christmas family dinner. I like trees, lights, gifts, family feast too. But I can get those things any other times, I do not need a specific day for those, especially not the day when millions of non-scientific minds, superstitious souls, celebrate their religious holy day.

I have decided to celebrate some of the birthdays this week. On December 24, I will celebrate the birth of physicist James Prescott Joule, who discovered a simple law connecting the current and resistance with the heat generated, and investigated the conversion of electrical and mechanical work into heat. On December 25, German author Charlotte von Stein’s birthday, I will celebrate the day by reading her books. It’s a great great day. Sir Isaac Newton, the English physicist, mathematician, astronomer’s birthday will be celebrated with music. Newton described universal gravitation and the three laws of motion, which dominated the scientific view of the physical universe for the next three centuries. On December 26, I will celebrate the birth of Charles Babbage, a mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical engineer who originated the concept of a programmable computer. On December 27, I will celebrate the birth of German astronomer Johann Kepler who discovered elliptical orbits and of Louis Pasteur, a French chemist and microbiologist, who created the first vaccines for rabies and anthrax and invented a method to treat milk and wine in order to prevent it from causing sickness, and of George Cayley who founded the science of aerodynamics and invented gliders. On December 28, it will be Auguste Lumiere and Louis Lumiere who were twin brothers opened the first commercial cinema, and American scientist, Kary Mullis a Nobel Prize winning American biochemist, author, who developed the polymerase chain reaction or PCR technique. December 29 will be celebrated for Charles Macintosh, a Scottish chemist and inventor of waterproof fabrics (Mackintosh raincoat). And for Charles Goodyear who invented the vulcanization process for rubber. On December 30, I will definitely drink a few bottles of Coca-Cola to celebrates the birth of Asa Griggs Candler who invented Coca-Cola. And will use my photo printer to celebrate Larry Bartlett’s birthday, Larry invented black and white photographic printer. And on December 31, I will celebrate the birth of American astronomer, Robert G Aitken, who was the first to discover binary stars. Then comes New Year’s Eve. I do not celebrate New Year’s Eve because I feel the first day of a new year is just like any other day. I do not find any reason to celebrate New Year’s Eve.

Are you thinking I am weird? Don’t worry, you can think whatever you like. I respect your right to have a thinking mind.

Maybe the atheists that you hang out with. I treat it as an excuse for pretty lights, the smell of pine tree, gift exchange, time with family and friends, and some extra time off from work. Sure the focus on family and friends should be year round, but it is good once in a while to provide extra focus on it. After all, it is our social bonds as much as our brains that have allowed us as a species to achieve all that we have.

Of course you’re weird. I respect your weirdness, greatly. There should be more of it!
You can celebrate reason every day, don’t tie yourself to a silly calendar’s religious days.
I shall celebrate tomorrow as a good day to be out on my bicycle, the forecast is kind and the hills are surmountable.
Merry reason to you.

I don’t much enjoy Christmas for any number of reasons, but mainly the over-the-top commercialism. I do like buying presents for people I love, and receiving them too. But what makes a present (given or received) truly valuable is 1) being a spontaneous expression of affection or esteem, and/or 2) being something the giftee genuinely wants or needs in their life.

The former is entirely negated at Christmas (I mean it’s not like it’s going to be a nice surprise for anyone that I bought them a present). And because there is a pre-determined expectation of exchanging gifts (with or without a desire to please or fulfill a need) the gifts are often unwanted or at least under appreciated.

So why do it? Because my family evidently enjoy it. We all do things we don’t enjoy all that much for the sake of those we love.

Taslima, if you and your loved ones make each other happy by doing things the way you do, then that’s really all that matters I think. As Bill & Ted said: Be excellent to each other!

Most Christians believe December 25th is the birthday of Jesus, but some historians blieve December 25th is not the birthday of Jesus.

Many reputable historians doubt such a person ever existed. There’s no historical evidence, only third hand accounts and rewritten books. Writers who lived at that time and their works still exist made no mention of such a person. The Soviet Union’s idea of “nonpersons” hadn’t been invented yet:

Even if such a person did exist, he was not the “son of god” nor did he performed miracles. More likely, it was a story of a local in Palestine that the Romans didn’t like and killed, and the fiction was embellished in a game of “telephone”. He wasn’t a major figure except to those who repeated the fictions.

Kids who get beaten up on the playground say, “I’ll get my big brother to beat you up!” That’s what this story is, people trying to comfort themselves with a fiction. They started to believe their own lies, and with each retelling, the lies got bigger. The christians’ claims about “jesus” are as farcical as North Korean propaganda about Kim Jong Il and Kim Il Sung.

I hate Christmas. Here, in the sub-artic Northern climes, we do need some kind of holiday to get through the winter, but christmas has nothing to do with this place. The thing I hate most about christmas is that it’s a generic mish-mash of references: Saturnalia, Yule, pagan trees, siberian legends, snow, camels, desert, arctic reindeer,christian nonsense, santa commercial nonsense.

It makes no sense that we’d be putting up manger/camel/desert decorations in the middle of the winter here and no sense for people in warmer climates to be decorating pine trees with snow-themed decorations.

I think we should all celebrate the solstice with something specific to the regions we live in. Fuck the religious and commercial aspects. Maybe a holiday to celebrate astronomers since the world’s earliest astronomer’s built megalyths to mark the solstices?

I don’t find you weird at all. I appreciate your position very much. I feel mostly the same though I care not about any ones birthday and being from the Wintry North, the Solstice has a rather poignant sense of the promise of the inevitability of Spring which I have a great appreciation for, even if I don’t actually ‘celebrate’ it.

do we really need religious fests to revive our spirit???? I mean we can also celebrate watching a nice thought provoking movie, finishing reading a book we wanted to read for long, or some quite moments with a dear friend in a serene place far from maddening crowd. Traveling or a sudden journey to a beautiful place generates so much happiness. Even a beautiful golden morning can touch our spirit. When every moment can be a fest itself, why bothering about religious fests???

Did Joule really discover the principle of conservation of energy? He certainly discovered the equivalence of heat and mechanical work and thereby ensured that heat transfer must be accounted for in exchange of energy between systems. The idea of conservation of energy is old. Also it is impossible that Newton was unaware of the transformation of potential energy into kinetic and vice versa so that total energy of a plant in a solar orbit. remains same. Even Leibnitz was aware of the concept as he tried to give a proof in simple systems of collisions. However Joule’s very important contribution was to show that heat is a form of energy. This is the first law of thermodynamics. Before Joule, people had very different notions of heat.

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